A clown at a birthday party, a Broadway show, a stadium rock concert, your friends fighting over the last potato chip–these are all forms of entertainment. Entertainment comes from the Old French entretenir, which means “to hold together,” or support. It is associated with hospitality, as in entertaining guests, and it has come to mean amusement or distraction. According to Bates and Ferri, entertainment is an activity understood objectively, involves communication between text and audience, provides an external stimulus, offers pleasure, requires an audience and occurs in a passive form.
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